Studio8 - Uniting the Arts

telling it like it is
is that just speaking your mind
was that easier to do in the fifties
and the sixties
when poets could find a book of poems
for a quarter or a dime
and a used typewriter for five
when poets hung out in the coffee dive

what does it mean to tell it like it is
does it mean that we know we have been
not told it like it is, but like it isn't

what it is, what it isn't
but as soon as you speak of the unspeakable
or think the unthinkable, tell it like it is
at least open up about things
that people are loath to talk about

poets in the fifties let the cat out of the bag
they rose telling it like it is to a true art
especially if jazz was playing in the joint
if you don't get the point, don't drag it

just let the flow of the unleashed words tell it

To me the 50s and 60s always seemed like a turning point of some significance, the beginning of some sort of flash point of flash evolution..

Flash is right, when you think the Beat poets happened in the fifties along with television. I always speak of my experience of a Beatnik type poet in a movie when I was twelve or thirteen. The movie Bucket of Blood a spoof movie, but the poet in the beginning was pretty good. As Ginsberg said, I am a TV baby.Of course in the sixties the psychedelic thing happened.I still believe that poetry has a voice that must be spoken, I think the Beat writers learned from the surrealists, and the Dada poets, but this was all before computers. It's like the music scene that happened in the fifties, rock and roll and Dylan lyrics influenced by poets he read then the psychedelic bands in the sixties, it was a kind of explosion of creative energy, but to my thinking it kinda went down hill with heavy metal and punk music, but maybe a little punk heavy poetry, ah no, but
some hip hop with blues and jazz, but the music scene is controlled like Hollywood. Poetry still seems to free of mind control.

excellent points in the poem and the subsequent comment ( mnaz too)....i think you are onto to something, a least that was my experience as well....poetry, music, is documentation, a record of the mindsets....and of course consequently it is real history and has real value...